After all, as Lena Horne says in her remembrance in . She never believed that the image they saw was what she really was.

And she resented that that image made people expect something, when she wanted to be herself.” Evans’ new book attempts to present the authentic Ava Gardner, but ultimately, it’s just a piece of the puzzle.

(“I either write the book or sell the jewels,” Gardner had told Evans when she first contacted him about the project, “and I’m kind of sentimental about the jewels.”) As a man with a client list that includes Nigella Lawson — one of his closest friends and about whom he is tight-lipped amid her marital trauma — Frederick Forsyth, Keith Richards and U2, Victor, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, has never been easily star-struck.

Indeed, he’s a star himself, with his own table at the Wolseley restaurant, a cocktail named after him at the Ivy and the motto “Why stay in when you can go out? And on her behalf he embarked on a labour of love that will finally be published next week after nearly a quarter of a century, despite the deaths of both subject and author, and Victor having to finish writing the memoirs himself.

“It’s a very tender memory for me,” smiles the 73-year-old Bronx-born literary agent.

“There was my father warning his 46-year-old son that one of the most iconic actresses of both our lifetimes might 'try to seduce me’.” Seduce him, Gardner did — though, at 64, it was with her story and wit, not that once sinfully beautiful face and body.

The book she truly deserves will include both her ribald voice and an examination of her place of her life as an actress.

Perhaps Evans was too caught-up in gossip-gathering to examine her legacy more thoughtfully.

Instead, Gardner’s official autobiography is sprinkled with remembrances from Ava’s friends and costars.

From Gregory Peck: “To my mind she developed into a very fine actress.